by Marci Shore
“It felt,” Vlasta wrote from Prague, “as if completely everything in this world, life, that was valid before, became absurd all of a sudden, unbelievably.”
Pan Sławek and Mikołaj and Dariusz all wrote to tell me that in Warsaw, thousands of miles from New York, people were praying for the victims, lighting candles in their windows, and bringing flowers to the American embassy. The Polish government declared three days of official mourning: Polish flags were lowered to half-mast.
“Neither America nor the whole world will ever be the same,” Mikołaj wrote the next day. “Yesterday something ended and something began.”
Pan Sławek wrote that when he saw on television sheets of paper posted around New York City with pleas for information about missing people, he was reminded of Warsaw: in 1939 when the Germans attacked, in 1944 after the uprising. Then, too, people desperately hoping for news of brothers and sisters, friends and children, husbands and wives and lovers, hung those sheets of paper, wandered the streets with photographs, in despair …
AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY I spoke with a poetess, a Polish-Jewish émigré from March 1968, about Michał Głowiński’s Holocaust memoir, The Black Seasons. She was somewhat resentful—not that Michał Głowiński had written the book but rather that he had not written it for so long.
“He was on ‘Aryan papers’ until 1996,” she said to me. “Why did he take so long to come out of the closet?” “Aryan papers” were falsified identification documents that Jews who escaped from the ghetto during the war used in order to pass as non-Jews.
Later I went to her poetry reading at a Polish bookstore downtown. She read poems in Polish about her Jewish father and about her exile in America. The émigré audience was moved.
“We have you to thank for the fact that now, once again, we feel like Poles,” one of the men in the audience told her gratefully.
These were the Polish Jews whom Władysław Gomułka had cast out: those who, over three decades later, above all still wanted to be—who still were—Poles.
THAT SPRING OF 2002 I returned to Toronto to give a lecture about the Berman brothers. It had been several years since I’d seen Stefan M., who had advised my master’s thesis there and who had first sent me to the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. Now we sat at a café at the university, and Stefan told me once again of how he had met Adam Ważyk’s daughter while hiking in the mountains.
“I loved her dearly,” he said.
Stefan M. had invited a friend to my lecture. Henry Dasko was a businessman in his fifties. The child of devoted communists, internationalists “of Jewish origin,” he had once been Henryk Daszkiewicz—before he had left Poland in the wake of the “anti-Zionist” campaign. He had been a student in Warsaw in March 1968 when his father came home one day and said, “I just heard Gomułka deliver a pogrom speech.” For Henryk it was unthinkable that his communist father would speak that way about the general secretary of the Party. His father lay down on the sofa, turned his face toward the wall, and barely moved for days.
Henryk Daszkiewicz took an active part in the protests against censorship. After he coauthored a student manifesto, he was expelled from the university and interrogated by the secret police. One night soon thereafter his father said to him and his mother, “Let’s go to the Majewskis’.”
The Majewskis were perhaps not friends but at least acquaintances; their son went to school with Henryk, and they lived nearby. When Henryk’s father rang the doorbell, it was the father, an army colonel, who answered the door.
“We’d like to stay the night,” Henryk’s father said.
“Is it that bad?” asked the colonel.
“I’m afraid it might be,” answered Henryk’s father.
Henryk and his parents spent that night in the Majewskis’ living room, on the hardwood floor, covered by a rug.
A few days later Colonel Majewski came to their apartment and asked Henryk’s father for a loan. Henry never learned how his father responded, whether he loaned the colonel the money or not, but even many years—decades—later, in emigration, Henry Dasko never felt free of the shame of that night spent on the Majewskis’ living room floor.
Soon afterward, Henryk’s father lost his job, and more devastatingly, after having dedicated his entire life to building communism, he lost his Party card.
For his son, the decision to leave or not to leave Poland was the most tormenting of his life. In the end Henryk Daszkiewicz packed a war-vintage hard-shell green suitcase full of books by his favorite Polish writers and exchanged his Polish citizenship for an exit visa.
BY SEPTEMBER 2001 Chaim Finkelstein was no longer alive, but in New York Stephanie arranged a meeting for me with his daughter. Awiwa was warm and open. I stood with Stephanie on the balcony of Awiwa’s penthouse in Chelsea, and Awiwa showed us where she had watched the World Trade Center burn—and told us of how, fifty-eight years earlier, she had stood on a roof in Warsaw’s “Aryan Side” and watched the Warsaw Ghetto burn.
I looked at the black-and-white photograph of Awiwa, her mother and her beautiful older sister—taken in the ghetto during the war, and sent to their father, who was already in America. Only Awiwa survived. She had been hiding in a Polish village. After the war she went to a Jewish committee and mentioned Adolf Berman’s name … in this way she found her way to her father’s old friends, who in turn sent the fourteen-year-old girl to her father in the United States. Awiwa still remembered her prewar Warsaw telephone number, but her Polish—the pure, proper Polish her parents had been so careful to speak to her—had faded.
I’d brought to the apartment copies of the letters her father had written to Adolf Berman during the decades following the war. I offered them to Awiwa hesitantly, guiltily—knowing there were things in them that would hurt her. Who was I to give them to her? And who was I to have them when she did not? I wanted to warn her, but I did not know how. I only asked if she wanted the letters, assured her that of course she need not … She did.
ON THE FIRST of May 2002, the last remaining Bundists gathered in downtown Manhattan to celebrate the workers’ holiday by singing “The Internationale.” They wanted me to give a speech and were very disappointed to learn that I was only a friend of the klezmer musician who had come to accompany them on the accordion, that I was a historian and not a revolutionary. For so long they had been waiting for the younger generations to join them.
The klezmer musician introduced me to an elderly man from Warsaw, a Bundist who before the war had known Jakub Berman. He spoke in Yiddish, but because my Yiddish was not very good I answered in Polish, so the Bundist switched to Polish as well. I began to ask him about the Berman brothers and the broad leftist alliance of the late 1930s that had brought together people like Adolf Berman, Michał Mirski, Wanda Wasilewska, and the Bundist leader Wiktor Alter, but before I could finish the question the elderly man interrupted, “Finally someone is speaking proper Polish!”
Then he lowered his voice: “Everyone here speaks Polish, of course, but badly, ungrammatically …”
And suddenly I felt the resilience of that Polish-Jewish snobbery, that phenomenon of the prewar years—nonsensically, absurdly, and yet somehow affectingly still present in twenty-first-century Manhattan.
I WANTED TO ask Adolf Berman’s erstwhile student Aleksander Masiewiecki for permission to use his letters. I knew this was painful for him, that I was asking for something I had no right to, that my existence in his life was an intrusion. I took Stephanie with me to Brooklyn. I needed her; I sensed that somehow she would make everything better. And she did.
We were both taken with them, Olga and Aleksander Masiewicki, this couple married for sixty-five years who had shared their first kiss in Warsaw’s Saxon Gardens, where in the spring I would take walks, pushing Rachel’s little baby in a stroller. They had met in 1935, at a student communist gathering held at the home of a friend, a girl whose parents were Hasidim but who herself had chosen Marxism.
For several hours we talked, and S
tephanie and I were absorbed by their extraordinarily complicated relationship to Polishness—and to Jewishness. Before the war Aleksander Masiewicki had been obsessed with the weakness, the vulnerability, of the Jews, the Jewish merchants so humiliatingly susceptible to anti-Semitically driven Polish boycotts. Above all, he had believed then, it was necessary for the Jews to become productive. It was reminiscent of an Enlightenment-era argument made by an eighteenth-century Polish philosopher: the Jews could not continue to be parasites, making their living as middlemen, trading in goods created by others; they must engage in productive labor. The communists, too, believed this—as did the Zionists.
I remembered what Aleksander Masiewicki had written to Adolf Berman after arriving in Brooklyn:
FOR MORE THAN THIRTY-FIVE YEARS, I followed a path that—as it turned out—was deceptive and ruinous. Nonetheless I don’t approach my failed past ahistorically. At the time when ideologically, emotionally, and organizationally I joined a movement that foretold so much yet had so little … it was the only alternative, the only HOPE. Zionism didn’t constitute any alternative. At present it’s able to RESOLVE the problem of ten or several tens of thousands of Polish Jews, but at that time it was powerless with respect to Russia’s three and a half million. It gave possibilities to individuals, but the fate of a whole nation had to be determined in that land which revealed itself to be inhospitable. And an awareness of that truth led us toward a movement that on its banners inscribed the noblest ideals of humanity—humanism, democracy, internationalism—but whose practice was already then the polar opposite of these ideals. Unfamiliarity or incomplete familiarity with the truth cannot constitute a justification for any of us. As in the great Greek tragedies, we stood before dilemmas, each of which portended disaster.
When after the war, Olga and Aleksander Masiewicki heard news of the pogrom in the Polish town of Kielce, they were unsurprised. They knew Polish anti-Semitism, yet they did not think of leaving Poland.
“We felt ourselves to be Poles,” they told us.
It was Stephanie who, before we left, asked Aleksander Masiewiecki if he would agree to let me use his letters. By then he no longer resisted: it had all been so long ago, in another lifetime, in another world … the letters no longer mattered. I could use them.
The Taste of Caviar
I was preparing to finish my book about Aleksander Wat, Władysław Broniewski, and Adam Ważyk, about Janina Broniewska and Wanda Wasilewska and the Berman brothers. I had decided I would title it Caviar and Ashes. Over the course of a few years I had written several times to Jakub Berman’s daughter, Pani Lucyna. There had never been a reply.
Then in February 2002, Jakub Berman’s daughter answered me. She had read some of my work and had heard about my lecture at the Władysław Broniewski Museum—and had concluded that there would be little sense in our talking. My perspective, she believed, was ahistorical; I had not tried to grasp the motives for what her father and others had done in a specific time and place, given the alternatives that then existed. “Especially,” she added, “for Jews.”
Something else, too, upset her:
As far as the effective title of your book is concerned, I’m wondering where the caviar comes from … for I remember well what we ate in Moscow: black rationed bread that we stood in lines for hours for and kasha from the cafeteria. If, on the other hand, the caviar is an allusion to the receptions hosted by Stalin, there were two or three occasions, and to my father’s taste that was very bitter caviar.
THAT SUMMER OF 2002 I went to the Russian archives. One Sunday when Ksenia and I were at the Moscow zoo, looking at the monkeys, Ksenia asked what I would title my book. I told her “Caviar and Ashes,” and when she learned that I had never tasted caviar she insisted we buy some at once. At home in her Moscow apartment we unpacked the bag from the delicatessen and set the table. I took only a small bite of the caviar, those tiny eggs, a shimmering, translucent red—and I suddenly understood Sepp’s description of flavor exploding inside your mouth; I nearly vomited. No taste had ever been so revolting.
It was not my first visit to Russia. I had first been in Moscow in the fall of 1993, when the capital of what Ronald Reagan had called the Evil Empire did not feel evil but did feel terrifying. Everything was larger than life, the streets grotesquely wide, the metro even deeper and more frightening than in Prague, with its violent turnstile that would assault anyone who did not correctly enter a ticket and its escalators racing down into the depths. The stations had been dug deeply to double as bomb shelters. The city had none of the beauty of Prague. It was dark and miserable. The faces were the mocking inverse of those in the photographs in all the communistera newspapers: no one was happy. Faces habituated to brutality. I saw a man lying dead in the metro.
When I next returned, seven years later, the city felt less terrifying. Still, inside the vastness of Moscow remained a brutality absent even in Petersburg. Ksenia loved this harsh city, Ksenia who was the antithesis of harshness, who was so delicate. Moscow was her home; it was beautiful to her.
On Arbat Street I spoke to a woman selling puppies. I held one in my hands; he wanted to stay with me, and I wanted to keep him. I asked the woman how much he cost.
“Ty znaesh’, chto nevozmozhno,” Ksenia told me sadly, pleadingly.
She was right. I knew it was impossible to keep the puppy; I was only in Russia for a few days more. Before I left, Ksenia and I went together to see Lenin’s body, a body without blood, so pale, reminiscent of a vampire. At the last moment Ksenia grabbed my hand. I, too, had not been prepared for something so macabre, so grotesque.
IN 1940, NIKITA Khrushchev sent two men, Ukrainian communist apparatchiks, to apologize to Wanda Wasilewska for the murder of her husband Marian Bogatko. One of those two men, the playwright Oleksandr Korneichuk, became her third husband. In 2002 I went to Kiev because Wanda Wasilewska had decided to remain there with Oleksandr Korneichuk after the war. It was there that she died in 1964, before her sixtieth birthday.
Kiev was full of fountains and playgrounds, street musicians and churches with gold domes. Linguistically, it was a disorienting city: all of the street signs, the price lists, the advertisements were in Ukrainian—yet all around me I heard Russian. In the cafés the menus were in Ukrainian, while the waiters and waitresses spoke in Russian.
At Babi Yar I saw an enormous monument—and an enormous ditch. So this was where the dead bodies of some thirty thousand Kievan Jews had fallen, one on top of another. A massacre in a ravine. I had not realized that Babi Yar was in the city, in Kiev, not so far from the center, where on Khreshchatyk Boulevard a man had let me hold his pet monkey.
AT THE ARCHIVE where her papers remained, I learned that Wanda Wasilewska and Oleksandr Korneichuk had shared not only an apartment in Kiev but also a dacha in the country, not more than an hour away by car. That afternoon I approached a young taxi driver outside a café and asked him to take me there. During the drive I told him I’d come to Kiev from New York, and he asked me if I had been there on September 11. How had I felt? He was the first person I’d met in the former Soviet Union who had asked me this question.
The dacha was now a museum, although since the fall of communism it was a museum that rarely had visitors. When we arrived, the student at the polytechnic university who moonlighted as a taxi driver suggested he wait for me in the car, but I asked him to come with me.
“It could be interesting,” I said.
The older woman who let us inside believed we were together, and she was obviously pleased: a young couple interested in Ukrainian history, a young Ukrainian man teaching his American wife about Ukrainian culture. She showed us the bedroom, the bookshelves, Wanda Wasilewska’s typewriter. The taxi driver listened attentively, he studied the photographs she showed us, he asked interested questions, and the woman who was the museum’s caretaker told us the story of how Ukrainian nationalists had murdered Wanda Wasilewska’s husband Marian Bogatko.
“It’s not true,” I said to
the taxi driver during the ride back to Kiev. And I told him the story of Wanda Wasilewska, and how it had been the NKVD who murdered her husband in Lvov, and how Nikita Khrushchev had sent Oleksandr Korneichuk to tell her the truth and to ask for her “understanding.” And how she had understood.
AT THE DACHA I’d asked the caretaker about Wanda Wasilewska’s daughter, Ewa. She told me that yes, Ewa Wasilewska was still alive, and living in Moscow. And she gave me Ewa Wasilewska’s phone number.
When I returned to Moscow from Kiev I visited Wanda Wasilewska’s daughter. In my mind Ewa Wasilewska was a fourteen-year-old girl who had lied about her age during the war so as to join the Polish division of the Soviet army and do her part to fight the Germans. Now she was a tall, handsome woman with gray hair in her seventies. Even after sixty years of living in Russia, she still spoke beautiful Polish—the Polish of the interwar intelligentsia. She was composed, open, reflective.
Her Moscow apartment, modest and old, had a kind of elegance—as did her small dachshund named Liza, who reminded me of the dogs Warsaw’s preeminent literary editor had once brought to Café Ziemiańska. Ewa Wasilewska affectionately described Liza as their domashnii tyran—their domestic tyrant.
I asked her about her mother’s reaction in 1956, when Khrushchev gave his “secret speech,” admitting to Stalin’s “excesses.”
“Rozrachunki sama ze sobą,” Ewa said of her mother’s silence then. An interior settling of accounts.
Was her mother Stalin’s lover?
Perhaps there had been something between them … Ewa herself did not know for certain, she remembered only being a young teenager and listening with hands cupped to the door, when her mother was shut inside a room, speaking on the telephone to the man who was so much more than a dictator.